Starting to plan a trip of this size was a bit of a daunting task.  Not only do we need to find out what visas and documents we need but we also what documents are needed for the Land Rover and where we can and can not take it!  I will warn you now, this is the boring bit so unless you are planning a trip of your own you may not want to read this!

Documents

I will have photocopies of all the important documents in case the originals get lost or stolen.  I have also been told that these are useful to use at police checkpoints as it is not unheard of for police to hold a document to ransom until you pay the bribe to get it back!  I am also taking a load of passport photos for any other forms needed to be filled out on route.

Personal

Passport -                          Ensuring we have plenty of time left before it expires and that there are enough free pages for visas and stamps

Drivers Licence -                  Standard full UK driving licence

International Driving licence -        Obtainable from the post office. Not necessary in a lot of countries but it can be helpful as it is in several different languages and scripts. 

Visas -                              Several of the countries we are visiting do not require us to have a visa but many do.  Each comes with varying degrees of difficulty to obtain.  For some we need to go through an agent and get them well in advance, for others we can just turn up at the boarder.  This is not something we want to get wrong as getting turned away from a border is not a situation we want to be in!

Travel Insurance -              Ensure that the insurance covers all the countries we are visiting and the contents of the car.

Car

Registration document -     The V5 owners� document is required to take the car into many countries.

ICMV -                              This is a multi-lingual version of the registration document.  Not compulsory but may ease the passage through borders and check points.  Not an easy document to get hold of as little information exists on the internet.  Even when I called the AA and RAC no one had heard of it!  If anyone is planning their own trip the number is 01256 493806 (it took ages to find this)

Carnet de Passage -         Effectively a passport for the car.  This document has a number of pages that are stamped when a vehicle enters and leaves a country.  It states that you are only importing the vehicle temporarily and will remove it within a fixed time period.  It means you can avoid paying import taxes or putting a bond down with the customs official, these are often difficult to get back.  The carnet is issued by the RAC in the UK and they require a bond linked to the value of the car and the countries you will be taking it.  Many countries require the bond to be one or two hundred percent of the value but some ask for six hundred percent, this means for our 12 year old Discovery we need a bond of �15000.

Insurance Green card -        This gives insurance cover for the EU.  It is impossible to get third party liability insurance for the whole trip so third party insurance will have to be bought at the boarder of most countries.  I don�t like our chances of getting any money back from this if we had an accident but it has to be done!

Other preparation

Off Road Driving

To get used to the capabilities of the car we did some off road driving on our own in the Lake District, with varying degrees of success.  We also attended a weekend long off-road expedition in Wales three weeks before we left.  This gave us the chance to give the car, in its completed expedition state, a dry run and check that it is fine to live out of as well as ensuring that there are no annoying squeaks and rattles to slowly drive us crazy over the coming months.  It also gives us a chance to see what the limits of the vehicle are, and what our limits are, when it comes to off road driving, with other people there to pull us out if it all goes wrong (learnt the importance of this the hard way)!

Medical Training

Prompted by the crash we had in the Lakes, we undertook a one day course on Emergency and Basic Fist Aid run by St John�s Ambulance service.  This is hopefully something we will never need!

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